Self-Recirculating Casing Treatment for a Radial Compressor

Casing treatment is a widely employed technique to increase the stall margins of turbomachineries. In the last several decades, many researches on casing treatment have been carded out. However, the mechanism of its expanding stall margins is still not very clear. Till now, most casing teatment schemes are designed for axial compressors, while the investigations on casing treatments in centrifugal compressors are rarely reported. Moreover, current investigation methods mainly focus on experiments, and perfect theoretic al analysis is not yet feasible. In order to study the effectiveness and further the mechanism of casing treatments in centrifugal compressors, in this paper, a computationally based investigation of the impact of the self-recireulating casing treatment on the performance of a radial compressor is carried out. The results indicate that, by casing bleed and injection, the casing treatment with inclined blades in the cavity expands the stall margin most. At low mass flows, the reversed flow through the cavity with inclined blades develops the counter swirl flow in front of the impeller inlet, which is considered to benefit increasing the pressure rise from the injection port to the bleed port and thereby augment the recirculating flow. At 120% design speed, the stall margin is larger than that at the design speed. However, the cost of extending the stall margin is the reduction of isentropic efficiency. A mended casing treatment by shifting the bleed port upstream is also studied. It is demonstrated that, relative to the original casing treatment, this mend can improve the efficiency evidently notwithstanding a little narrowing of the flow range.